New Strategy Forged for Safe Use of Antidepressants in Kids & Adolescents

Although selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medications are considered the current standard for pharmaceutical care for depression, the medications must be carefully prescribed to avoid the risk of suicide among children and young adults.

A multidisciplinary team of Johns Hopkins researchers has developed two new strategies to safely treat depression in young people using the SSRI class of medications. These strategies, recently published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, incorporate a new understanding of how to mitigate the risk of suicide while on SSRI treatment.

“These medications have to be dosed in a careful way,” said senior investigator Adam Kaplin, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Just as with medications for high blood pressure, diabetes, and anti-coagulation therapy, Kaplin said careful dosing of SSRIs is “exactly what psychiatrists have been doing for a long time in adults” to mitigate the negative effects of the medications.

For children and adolescents, however, treatment regimens have tended to be more intense in order to treat depression quickly. Kaplin said that’s because “it is excruciatingly painful to wait for kids to respond when they are often already at the end of their ropes before meeting with a medical professional.”

Young people rarely seek treatment for depression on their own, and it may take a while before parents become aware of their child’s depression, he says. Once aware, parents may try other means of treatment before seeking medical attention.

Sometimes, the treatment may be as dangerous as the illness, or a Catch-22 situation may develop where untreated depression can lead to suicide while use of SSRIs can also increase risk of suicide.

For example, SSRIs have been found to increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior (“suicidality”) in children and adolescents.

In 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a black box warning for SSRIs — the most serious warning a prescription medicine can receive — because in a summary examination of all drug company-sponsored studies, the drugs increased suicidal thoughts and action by two to four percent, compared with a placebo during the initial weeks after starting the medications.

With more than 10 percent of all children and adolescents in the U.S. suffering from major depressive disorder, however, the black box warning had an unintended effect.

In their study, Kaplin and his team asked whether these early negative effects shortly after starting SSRIs could be mitigated either by the same kind of careful dosing done in adults with anxiety disorders or by combining SSRI treatment with another medication previously shown to hasten SSRIs’ therapeutic effects in adults.

The team began by analyzing the same data the FDA used in 2004 to issue its black box warning. They found that SSRIs made young patients more impulsive, particularly during the first month of treatment, but don’t create suicidal thoughts where there were none before, Kaplin said.

The researchers then performed a computer simulation to find optimal dosing for the faster-acting SSRIs — paroxetine (Paxil), citalopram (Celexa), sertraline (Zoloft), venlafaxine (Effexor), and fluvoxamine (Faverin, Luvox) — in kids so that these other SSRIs would act in a similar way to fluoxetine (Prozac), said Kaplin.

Currently, fluoxetine (Prozac), the slowest-acting SSRI, is the only SSRI that is FDA-approved for children eight to 12. It can take several weeks or months for fluoxetine to reach therapeutic levels in the blood and begin to have an effect.

When they tested their model, the researchers found that it generated the same kinds of dosing regimens psychiatrists use for dosing adults experiencing SSRIs’ negative effects. Those regimens often start with half the normal initial dose and slowly increase it to achieve therapeutic levels.

The newly proposed dosing guidelines likely would improve safety, but they would also slow how long it takes before patients receive relief, even from the faster-acting SSRIs.

“One of the hardest parts of our jobs is to get people through that delayed period of time when we all wish our medicines worked faster,” said Kaplin. So the researchers also looked for a way to completely block SSRIs’ negative effects.

Working with mice, the researchers found that adding a molecule called WAY-100635 — used in adult human research studies — produced “a synergistic effect when given with an SSRI,” said Kristen Rahn, Ph.D., an instructor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurology. “And it completely alleviated the anxiety the animals had.”

Given by itself, though, WAY-100635 had no significant effect on anxiety levels. The compound helps the brain get serotonin, a neurotransmitter. Long-term exposure to SSRIs eventually increases serotonin levels, the goal of treatment, but the initial exposure reduces serotonin.

“Now that we have uncovered this effect and worked out this mechanism,” says Kaplin, “we are in the process of communicating with pharmaceutical companies to see which of them might have tested a drug similar to WAY-100635 that didn’t do anything by itself and therefore was abandoned.”

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Rick Nauert PhD

Dr. Rick Nauert has over 25 years experience in clinical, administrative and academic healthcare. He is currently an associate professor for Rocky Mountain University of Health Professionals doctoral program in health promotion and wellness. Dr. Nauert began his career as a clinical physical therapist and served as a regional manager for a publicly traded multidisciplinary rehabilitation agency for 12 years. He has masters degrees in health-fitness management and healthcare administration and a doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin focused on health care informatics, health administration, health education and health policy. His research efforts included the area of telehealth with a specialty in disease management.